Chamber and committees

It then produces a report on that.

So it is currently an open-ended arrangement.

Before I ask those questions, I want to briefly refer back to the convener’s remarks about the ferries at the beginning of the session. As you know, I have raised the possibility of an investigation on a number of occasions in the past months. I am pleased to hear that you are going to take a serious look at the committee’s recommendations and come back to us on them.

There is no pressure here, but I would find it extremely difficult to understand it if a decision was made not to carry out some sort of scrutiny, because tens of millions of pounds of public money have been involved, and people have the right to know where that money has gone. It is over to you on that decision. As I said, there is no pressure.

I do not expect a response to that.

What is unclear to me is where the support is for you in terms of governance and the oversight that you are talking about. Clearly, it failed previously. The committee is trying to ascertain the possibilities of it failing again down the line—not necessarily now, but in five or 10 years. Are there adequate red flags, as you call them, that somebody could pick up and respond to?

We have always been a wee bit vague as to how much authority the SPCB has over you. Yours is an independent function. Can you define the areas in which the SPCB exerts governance over your office and the ways in which it supports your office, which it funds? Where could that be improved? Is the SPCB the major governing body that you refer to?

There are two aspects to that. You talked about R100. Some people are excluded because the physical service has not been made available to them, which has an impact on them, their business and so on. However, there are also those who choose not to engage and not to be part of the digital world. There is a surprising number of such people, as I have found at first hand. If they make that choice, is that a human rights issue? Probably not: it is their choice. Some people may not wish to engage, because of age or any other reason. How do you separate out the genuine human rights issue, in order to target those who are most in need of digital inclusion?

What do you consider to be your current relationship with the two subject committees and the standards commissioner? Are your relationships with those working?

I guess that there is always a desire to quantify and put a figure or number on exclusion. There seems to be lots of different wrinkles in that. How will you tease those out and ensure that, when you put a number on something, you are putting it on the right thing?

My second question is about estates management. As you know, over the years we have looked at figures from colleges and the NHS in particular where there have been maintenance backlogs that have been categorised from urgent to less so. You are going to be doing some work on this. Are you going to pick out the college sector and NHS for it and give us some sort of a feel for where they are going—are they improving or are they going down? There is a lot of money involved in those sectors and we need to understand the issues.

You may tell me if I am wrong, but I understand that the Auditor General has already arranged that the paperwork that is sitting at Ferguson’s has been secured, although it is not in great shape.